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For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

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Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

#171

Post by patrickyeon »

motters wrote: post #92
NickPollard wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my friends who teaches 11-16 year-olds recently had to explain to one of her classes what camera film was, and how it was used.

The movement from camera film to digital cameras was a largely unnoticed revolution which took place within the last decade.

In industry, that may be so (I seem to recall one of the Star Wars prequels being the first feature movie done entirely with digital cameras). For end-user video cameras (handicams, or whatnot), we've been storing to magnetic tape for a good bit longer though.

Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

#172

Post by brudgers »

evilduck wrote: post #132
brudgers wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "A massive pile of legacy Windows stuff probably assumes C: is the boot volume. " Seeing as Windows has been bootable from removable drives and over networks for a long time, I sincerely doubt it.

You've [luckily] never seen internally written software then. I see stuff referencing hardcoded paths to "C:\winnt\system32\" dlls all the time.

Hard coded paths are possible with any operating system, including OSX which was mentioned in the post to which I responded. And when dealing with it, assigning C: to the bootable drive is a feature of a particular implementation, not a legacy of the Operating System. So far as I am aware, no part of recent Windows versions are required to be installed on C:

Even if writing code to require it is trivial.

Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

#173

Post by calloc »

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #142
dctoedt wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of months ago, my siblings and I were cleaning out our parents' house. In the attic, I came across my original Compaq sewing-machine luggable. I'd given it to my dad when I upgraded to something newer. If memory serves, the Compaq came with two 5.25" floppy drives and 256K RAM. When I was using it myself, I upgraded to 640K RAM, swapped the B: drive for a 10 -MB hard disk, and eventually swapped the A: drive…

Last time I fired mine up (a couple of years ago), it still booted. However, an alarming amount of smoke came out of the fan vent so I didn't keep it running for long.

Science compels you!

Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

#174

Post by dfox »

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #60

> "Please Insert Disk 13" OH GOD WHERE IS DISK 13, I CAN'T FIND DISK 13. - Jeff 16 hours ago I have exactly this memory as well. My first computer was a Compaq Deskpro Portable. It had a 5.25" floppy drive and a 40 MB hard disk. It was an embarrassment of riches - how could you ever fill up 40 whole mega bytes? Between that and my custom AUTOEXEC.BAT file, I was set. As it happens, I still have most of the files I cr…

And in case of installing Windows 3.11, this was even more hilarious because of the fact that installer did not want all the disks in order, but only first five or so and then proceeded to demand disks in essentially random order, and in some cases the numbering on disks themselves did not match installers idea. I vaguely remember that printer drivers that installer expected on disk 7 or 8 (depending on whenever you used "Standard install" or "Expert install") were actually on disk 9.

Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

#175

Post by jeffmould »

cubicle67 wrote: post #133
anon_for_this_1 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh the Vic 20. Warms my heart just hearing about it :) My parents bribed me to do some stuff when I was younger with the reward of a floppy disk drive. I was living like a boss when I got that drive!

Still got mine, and a box of cartridges. Hacked the paddles into an some electronics experiment years ago, and the RF modulator's given up the ghost, but other than that still all good. Even still got the book, minus the back cover

Still got mine too. Still worked as of a few years ago when I dragged it out of the attic. Even got all the books, games I had copied from the BBSes, and a few cartridges. I should pull it out to see how well my 300 baud modem works on today's Internet.

Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

#176

Post by fourspace »

RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #52

My first computer didn't have disk drives at all - it used standard audio cassette tapes in standard audio cassette machines. I remember feeding the audio into an oscilliscope and reverse engineering the format used on the tape, then writing Z80 machine code (I didn't have an assember - I wrote actual hex opcodes and fed them into a program I wrote that read hex and poked the values into memory) to create tapes that…

Ah yes, saving data onto a cassette tape. My parents purchased an Atari 1200XL in the early 80s and when I was about five years old, I quickly hijacked it to play games and eventually learn how to write code. For the longest time I wondered what the cassette drive was for; why would you play music on your Atari? Then I realized, "Wait a minute! I can store data and turn the computer off?!"

My life was complete.

Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

#177

Post by dfox »

snorkel wrote: post #163

Don't even get us old timers started on how we used to mount CD drives. Editing AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS and making sure the sound card driver loaded after so it wouldn't steal the same interrupt, and sometimes D:\ would appear to be there but you couldn't read it ... ah, my back hurts! Get off my lawn!

An writing another batchfile as to load MSCDEX only when you actually need to access CDROM as to preserve these precious 50kB of conventional memory :)

Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

#178

Post by _b8r0 »

lamby wrote: post #153
JonnieCache wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go for the original: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eDaSvRO9xA 1948's finest.

You were lucky. When I was a lad there were only 3 Yorkshiremen in that sketch.

3! Paradise! We never had 3 Yorkshiremen, we had to make do with a pair of pythons, a goodie and Doctor Frankensteins' henchman. And we didn't even have an abacus to program on, we had to make do with fingers and toes and pretend they were turing compliant. And some of us didn't even have toes or fingers!

Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

#179

Post by jeffmould »

forinti wrote: post #35

I must be a ancient, because I remember having to identify which side of the floppy I wanted to use! On the BBC Micro, the first drive had sides 0 and 2; the second drive had sides 1 and 3. And I was lucky to have two drives. I only saw HDs on magazines.

How about having to notch the other side of a single sided floppy to make it double sided. Or even having to put tape over a notch to make it read-only. I remember those little black pieces of tape that came with a box of floppies to make the read-only.

Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

#180

Post by _b8r0 »

RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #52

My first computer didn't have disk drives at all - it used standard audio cassette tapes in standard audio cassette machines. I remember feeding the audio into an oscilliscope and reverse engineering the format used on the tape, then writing Z80 machine code (I didn't have an assember - I wrote actual hex opcodes and fed them into a program I wrote that read hex and poked the values into memory) to create tapes that…

Why the oscilliscope? No SAVE command? Why did you need to overwrite the stack?
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